Will blexting in Detroit catch on? Officials hope it will

6:57 PM, July 11, 2014

Detroit officials aim to enlist thousands of Detroiters to help the city keep a digital map of property, blighted and otherwise, by snapping shots with a smartphone or tablet and sending them to a public database. A house on the 600 block of Virginia Park is photographed along with 380,000 other parcels of land to aid in the city's blight removal campaign. / Kathleen Galligan/Detroit Free Press

Detroit Free Press

Blexting — a new word added to Detroit’s lexicon— describes sending a new photo and survey data of property to help fight blight.

The slang term — a mashup of blight and texting — is the latest word combo involving texting.

Sexting, which was listed in the Merrian-Webster’s dictionary in 2012, is a portmanteau of sex and texting. It means sending sexually explicit messages between phones. Blexting, however, might not be as stimulating — unless ruin porn (photos of decaying buildings) turns you on.

City officials aim to enlist thousands of Detroiters to help stay on top of its blight removal by snapping shots of properties with a smartphone or tablet and sending them to a public database.

Staffers from the nonprofit Data Driven Detroit and the consulting firm Loveland Technologies, which created the database, will start training community activists and others to contribute new information about neighborhood properties.

Anyone interested in learning to blext for the Motor City Mapping project can contact their City of Detroit District Manager’s office through the city’s Department of Neighborhoods.

The up-to-the-minute information on properties in the city will go into a digital map.

The technology, in effect, launches an interactive conversation between city officials and citizens over the condition of neighborhoods down to individual houses and vacant lots.